Article
Basket Trials Have FDA Support, But Will They Deliver?
Following the introduction of adaptive clinical trials, cancer researchers are now working on another revolutionary model, and they have the FDA's support in this effort. Named basket studies because they group different cancers together based on the driver mutation rather than the tumor of origin, these trials do not use the standard treatment as a control group, but look for a "Yes" or "No" response.
Chemotherapy and radiation failed to thwart Erika Hurwitz’s rare cancer of white blood cells. So her doctors offered her another option, a drug for melanoma. The result was astonishing.
cancer
“It has been a miracle drug,” said Mrs Hurwitz, 78, of Westchester County.
Within four weeks, a red rash covering her body, so painful she had required a narcotic patch and the painkiller OxyContin, had vanished. Her was undetectable.
She is part of a new national effort to try to treat cancer based not on what organ it started in, but on what mutations drive its growth.
Complete article in The New York Times: http://nyti.ms/1JQtaLs
